Access to Healthful Foods among an Urban Food Insecure Population: Perceptions versus Reality

Abstract

The influence of local food environments on the risk for obesity is important overall, but may be particularly important for food insecure populations in urban settings. Access to healthful foods is most limited among racial and ethnic minorities and low-income populations; these same populations experience the highest rates of obesity and food insecurity. Few valid and reliable measures have been developed to assess the quality of local food environments. This research addresses this gap by introducing an inventory for measuring self-reported perceptions of food access and then compares the perceptions measure to objective assessments of local food environments. Data are focused on an urban population experiencing disproportionate rates of food insecurity. The four-item perceptions of food access inventory had high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha=0.80). Participants' perceptions of access to healthful foods mirrored the reality of their food environment; however, perceptions of access to alcohol and tobacco were less accurate. Findings suggest that people living in low-income, urban, minority, and food insecure communities can validly assess (in)access to healthful foods. Future research is needed to further validate the perceptions of food access measure introduced and, more importantly, to develop strategies for increasing access to healthful foods in food insecure contexts.

Perceptions of the food shopping environment are associated with greater consumption of fruits and vegetables

“…Despite these limitations, our study extends the growing body of literature that highlights the importance of personal, subjective assessments of the food shopping environment (19,23,24,29) . Our analysis examines the role that perceptions of the quality, selection and convenience may play in promoting increased consumption of fruits and vegetables.…”

Perceptions of the food environment are associated with fast-food (not fruit-and-vegetable) consumption: findings from multi-level models

“…Discrepancies between studies may also be contributed by different measures of both food-environment perceptions and dietary consumption, and different populations under study. Future research should build on nascent work to incorporate both self-report and objective data into more robust, reliable, and generalizable measures (Freedman and Bell 2009;Moore et al 2008a;Moore et al 2008b).…”

The food environment, its effects on dietary consumption, and potential for measurement within agriculture-nutrition interventions

“…While some studies have shown that self-reported perceptions of food access correlate well with objective assessments of the local food environment (Freedman and Bell 2009), others conclude that subjective measures do not line up to objective food environment measures (Moore et al 2009;Williams et al 2011;Winkler et al 2006). Subjective measurements are thus important to take into consideration when evaluating how people interact with their environments to purchase and consume food (Cummins 2007).…”